Linux.FR has an interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."

That's a very ignorant and unfair claim. If you look at the ALSA changlogs for the last years you will see that Lennart has committed a MASSIVE amount of bugfixes for ALSA drivers himself!

Also take a look at some audio driver source code sometime. The workarounds needed to make some hardware work are agonizing at times.

The manufactures provide Windows-drivers already complete with workarounds for hardware bugs but just because the bugs normally (when using Windows) aren't exposed to the end user doesn't mean that the hardware isn't buggy.

The FOSS world doesn't usually have the luxury of manufacturer support. Things like this are found by trial-and-error by committed people like Lennart.